Dealing effectively with adult offenders

The Government's Crime Reduction Strategy

Dealing effectively with adult offenders

Action points

We will reduce delays in criminal proceeding by rolling out the Narey reforms to speed up the time taken from arrest to disposal;

We are modernising procedures and improving information flows across the criminal justice system;

£226m to improve prison regimes and reduce re-offending;

New measures in the Crime and Public Protection Bill to reform the Probation Service and ensure tougher enforcement of community sentences;

We have introduced new, more effective and better targeted penalties;

Key provisions: Crime and Public Protection Bill

Restructuring of the Probation Service into a centrally driven unified service with 42 operation areas, aligned to police boundaries and which is directly accountable to the Home Secretary for achieving firm performance objectives focussed on reducing re-offending.

Speedier and more effective enforcement of community sentences.

New measures to stop sex offenders and other unsuitable people from working with children.

An extension of mandatory drug testing across the criminal justice system in England and Wales to help break the link between drug misuse and crime.

Wider use of electronic monitoring including the creation of a new exclusion order, and providing the court with a power to permit the monitoring of a community sentence electronically or by other means.

2. Action to prevent crime occurring needs to be supported by fast, effective justice when crime is committed, to ensure that offenders can quickly be apprehended and brought to justice. For the first time there are clear, shared objectives for the criminal justice system:

To reduce crime and the fear of crime and their social and economic costs
To dispense justice fairly and efficiently and to promote confidence in the rule of law.

3. Crime reduction is not just about reacting to crime: we also need to prevent or reduce reoffending. This requires a strategy for effective sentencing and punishment which aims, amongst other things, to ensure that appropriate and effective penalties are available, that they are properly targeted, and that they are effectively enforced. Our forthcoming Crime and Public Protection Bill will consolidate work already begun in these areas.

Reducing Delays

National implementation of Narey measures

3. We are committed to reducing delays in criminal proceedings which frustrate victims, prolong their anguish, impede justice, waste public money and gives the wrong signal to offenders. A number of procedural reforms designed to reduce delay have been piloted, many of them stemming from the Review of Delay in the Criminal Justice System (The Narey Review. The pilot exercise, evaluated by consultants Ernst & Young, showed a reduction in average times between charge and disposal from 85.5 to 30.0 days for adults and 89.3 to 37.9 days for youths. New procedures for indictable only cases are being piloted until the end of the year. Subject to the outcome of the evaluation of the pilots, these new procedures will be implemented nationally from summer 2000.

Sir Iain Glidewell's Review of the Crown Prosecution Service

4. The Crown Prosecution Service is working with the police and other criminal justice system agencies to implement a number of Glidewell recommendations aimed at reducing duplication of delay, and focusing on more serious casework by the establishment of Criminal Justice Units and Trial Units.

Modernising procedure

Video Links

5 Video Links between prisons and magistrates’ courts for preliminary hearings have been tested in some areas. The defendant remains in custody and sees and hears the court, and is seen and heard by it, over a video conference link. National implementation of video links offers the potential to deliver a wide range of savings and benefits, not just to prisons and magistrates’ courts, but to the wider criminal justice system. These range from enhancing public safety, obtaining best value from resources and improving efficiency, to supporting wider government initiatives for modernisation and electronic delivery of public services. An implementation programme for the magistrates courts will start in 2000. A pilot on similar lines is taking place in Manchester Crown Court and will be evaluated after 3 months.

Video Link in action:

In court - Court 5 in Swindon Magistrates’ Court looks at first sight like any other. However it has the additional provision of television monitors to give the magistrates, clerk, defence and prosecution lawyers and members of the public, a view of a room in the prison in which the defendant is held in custody. A single camera focuses on whoever is speaking in court. The clerk has a fax machine, for sending warrants, bail notices and other documents such as defence papers and legal aid forms to the prison. There is also a telephone just outside the courtroom so that the defence lawyer can take instructions from the defendant in confidence during the hearing, if necessary.

In prison - the defendant in Eastwood Park prison in Gloucestershire sits in front of a single monitor which shows the picture from the camera in Swindon’s Court 5. She is accompanied by a prison officer during the hearing. The telephone, for communication with her lawyer, is on the desk. The fax machine is nearby. Before the hearing she will have seen a short training film explaining how the hearing will be conducted. The prison officer also explains the procedure and answers any questions. Both the prison and magistrates’ court have a booth containing additional video conference equipment to enable defence lawyers to have face-to-face discussions with their clients before or after the hearing.

Improving information flows

6. The initiative for Integrating Business and Information Systems (IBIS) will ensure that accurate, up-to-date information is available where and when needed without unnecessary duplication. IBIS published a medium term strategic plan for information systems in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) on 29 October. The plan outlines a vision of the CJS of the future where fast, accurate exchange of information will reduce delay and speed up justice. IBIS are developing a supporting programme to deliver the interfaces between systems necessary to increase the speed of information exchange across the CJS. An estimated 170,000 adjournments result from magistrates' courts not having direct access to DVLA's information on vehicle and driver licensing. IBIS will change this. Benefits are already flowing from the delivery of electronic links between magistrates’ courts and the DVLA and wider access by CJS agencies to criminal records on the Police National Computer. A linked up criminal justice system will have significant impact on case handling through the system in terms of speed, decision making and quality of service to witnesses, victims, jurors and defendants.

Improving prison regimes

7. Prison is necessary for the most serious and persistent offenders both to punish and contain but also to reduce re-offending. Research suggests that drugs, employment, accommodation and finances all affect re-offending rates. The Prison Service is committed to reducing re-offending and crime by providing constructive regimes which address offending behaviour, improve educational and work skills and promote law abiding behaviour in custody and after release. The Government has provided £226m over three years for this purpose. Priority areas are as follows:

Addressing offending behaviour

8. The Government has provided £26 million for a major strategy to expand the volume and range of formal offending behaviour programmes. These are programmes developed and accredited in accordance with large-scale research on What Works in reducing recidivism. The target is to double the number of completions by prisoners by 2001-02.

Improving educational and work skills

9 The Prison Service has a commitment to improve basic skills amongst the prisoner population. Targets will be set to reduce by 15% by 2002 numbers of prisoners leaving at the end of their sentence without basic communication skills. It is developing a range of strategies, in partnership primarily with the Basic Skills Agency, to integrate basic skills learning and accreditation into other regime activities, e.g. physical education, catering and the workplace. This programme is supplemented by seven pathfinder projects in the community, supported by the Crime Reduction Programme, also addressing the need to improve offenders' basic skills.

10. The Prison Service’s Welfare to Work programme started in April 1998, is linked to the Employment Service’s New Deal for long-term unemployed 18-24 year olds. The programme aims to:

improve participants’ employability and increase their chances in the job market; and
help them gain the maximum benefit from the New Deal Gateway on release.

Tackling drug addiction

11. The Government is investing an additional £76 million to allow the Prison Service to tackle drug misuse by those serving custodial sentences. The additional funding will provide improved and more widely available assessment and treatment services for prisoners with drug misuse problems; units for prisoners who wish to commit themselves to avoiding drugs; improved drug training for staff working in prisons; and, improved security to prevent drugs from entering prisons. It is estimated that the drug testing, assessment and referral services could reduce recorded crime by 25,000 in 2001 -2002.

Managing dangerous people with severe personality disorder

12. The Government is committed to finding more effective means of responding to the challenge presented by a small number of extremely dangerous and severely personality disordered people. This will involve new powers to allow for the detention of such people for as long as they remain a high risk, coupled with the development of better means of treating those detained so as to reduce the level of risk they present. A consultation document outlining the Government's plans was published on 15 July 1999, and responses have been requested by 31 December 1999.

Tougher enforcement of community sentences

What works

13. The main job of the Probation Service is to protect the public by enforcing community punishments effectively so as to reduce re-offending, contain risk, and reduce crime. Following the Comprehensive Spending Review, the Government has made available an extra £127 million over three years to the probation service - but this must be matched by improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. Through the Crime Reduction Programme, we are making sure that the work the Probation Service undertakes with offenders actually does reduce re-offending. From April 2000, all services will start to deliver accredited programmes with a target of 10,000 offenders on accredited programmes in the community by March 2001/02, and 60,000 by March 2003/04. The development of 'what works' and more effective community interventions could bring about a reduction in recorded crime of 10,000 in 2001-2002.

National Standards

14. The enforcement of community sentences must be improved, so that offenders who breach a court order are returned to court promptly to be dealt with. We are tightening the National Standards for the Supervision of Offenders in the Community to toughen the breach standards. This will mean that offenders who fail to comply with their community sentences will be brought back before the court sooner - after two unacceptable absences rather than the current three. The revised Standards will come into force in April 2000.

15. In addition, the Government is addressing poor performance of court warrants following non-payment of fines and breaches of community sentences, by transferring responsibility for warrant execution from the police to magistrates' courts.

Linking compliance with payment of social security

16. Again, to improve the enforcement of community penalties we are linking payment of benefits to compliance with community sentences. The Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Bill will contain measures to withdraw selected benefits from offenders who fail to comply with community penalties. This sanction is to designed to send a clear message that a person must meet their obligations to society in exchange for rights and benefits: offenders who choose not to comply with their sentences should not expect the state to continue to support them regardless.

Targeted Sentencing

Informing the sentencers

17. If the Government is to reduce levels of reconvictions both for offenders given community sentences and for those sentenced to custody, sentencers need better information about the success of different disposals in reducing re-offending rates and better feedback about the outcome of individual sentencing decisions. To make sentences as effective as possible, the courts need to have a clear understanding of the disposals which are available to them and their effectiveness for different types of offender. As part of the Crime Reduction Programme we are therefore funding a project to identify ways of ensuring that courts have available information of this sort, to improve the quality of this information and to give magistrates better information about the outcome of many cases which are sent to the Crown Court for sentence. At the moment, many cases which go to the higher court receive a sentence which the magistrates could have given, which adds to the delays and costs in the criminal justice system.

Sentencing Advisory Panel

18. The Government is also committed to greater consistency in sentencing, to ensure proper punishment but also to increase public confidence in the system. We have established the Sentencing Advisory Panel, which began work on 1 July 1999. It will provide advice to the Court of Appeal on sentencing guidelines, the greater use of which should help to ensure more consistent sentencing. An initial set of views on environmental offences have gone out to consultation and it will be considering shortly offences concerning the possession of weapons, handling stolen goods, and racially motivated offences.

New technology

19. We should make the fullest possible use of new technology for the supervision of offenders, as part of our overall commitment to reduce re-offending and protect the public. Electronic monitoring does not in itself achieve those objectives but can make a positive contribution to reducing re-offending if properly targeted and delivered. Tagging has shown its worth so far in Home Detention Curfew as a transition between custody and the community . The successful completion rate of 95% is very encouraging. Trials of curfew orders enforced by electronic monitoring have shown that these can work as a sentence in their own right, and the pilot schemes are being rolled out nationally from December. We are now actively considering how technology can be used in more innovative ways . The Crime and Public Protection Bill will introduce powers to extend the use of new technology into new areas.